How do you handle non-business hour critical requests? | Community
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How do you handle non-business hour critical requests?

  • September 11, 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 0 views
Jake11

Curious to know what suggestions the community has. Currently my team works very typical US Monday-Friday corporate business hours, and then we do weekend rotations where we monitor our queues a couple of times on Saturday and Sunday to see if anything critical requires action prior to start of business on Monday. This opens up the risk of us not seeing these issues as soon as they're submitted and it could be hours before we first get to it, so I'm curious what others have done to ensure on-call resources get notified quickly for true high severity issues but aren't actually doing full after hours shifts (something I want to avoid). 

I was thinking it would be great to have a dedicated line tied to PagerDuty or something and mention it in ticket creation email notifications if it's something that warrants us to assist outside of our standard business hours. This way the on-call resource gets paged and it's not the client directly calling the employee - which I want to avoid as it's awkward if it's a situation where the employee is being woken up.

      2 replies

      M
      • Mark12
      • September 11, 2023

      hi again @jake11! 

      We have a similar workflow and we actually use Zapier to send out notifications to the team. In general I've found Zapier amazingly useful to extend the capabilities of Zendesk and fill many of the functionality gaps. Here's the basic flow:

      • Ticket is created outside of business hours, ZD adds a tag via trigger 
      • We used to have a number of key phrases in this trigger but since our 'out of business hours' is now quite small due to expanded coverage, we've removed these. But in general I'd recommend using key words or if you have a client severity field, using this to reduce the number of notifications as you mentioned
      • A view is tied to this tag, which in turn triggers an integration on the Zapier side
      • Zapier then sends the 'on call' user an email and a text message to alert them of the ticket 

       

      J
      • Judy11
      • October 26, 2023

      We are in a similar situation. Currently have staff in Europe and North America that work M-F standard business hours but are looking to offer 24/7 support for critical issues. We are currently looking at leveraging PagerDuty to notify on-call staff when a critical issue is logged -https://www.zendesk.com/marketplace/apps/support/218958/pagerduty/?_ga=2.39666595.1688691531.1698359087-1639188461.1631316442

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